Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

This paper provides an overview of the author's derivation of the most productive areas for urban research. The first general topic to be considered is the understanding of the urban process, together with the role of that understanding in planning; the second general topic is the problem of generating a limited number of alternative policies which may be considered to be in some sense optimal—in part, the problem of urban design. In each case, the nature of the problems associated with the topic is explored, and a number of suggestions are made for fruitful directions for research.

This paper attempts to measure systematically the extent of blight in a single metropolitan area. Using a sample of individual dwelling units, the paper first describes a method of quantifying some previously neglected aspects of residential quality and demonstrates that they are highly valued by urban households. Secondly, it illustrates the feasibility of generalizing these quality measurements of sample dwellings to all city blocks using widely available explanatory variables. The analysis finds strong inferential evidence of an important, but elusive, relationship among the level of public services provided to particular dwelling units (police protection and schools), measures of residential quality, and the market's valuation of these units. The models described in this paper relate to an important range of urban renewal questions. For example, they can be used to obtain lower bound estimates of the potential benefits of urban renewal programs.

The concept of the ‘multi-organisation’ is used to obtain a clearer view of the problems of decision-making in one field of public planning where the pattern of organisational responsibilities is exceptionally diffuse: that relating to the planned expansion of towns to channel the pressures for change within a region. Four basic types of multi-organisational activity are identified, concerned with the redistribution of population and employment within a region, the negotiation of local agreements, the coordination of local operations, and the coordination of external authorisations by different government agencies. Some of the main characteristics of these four activities are identified, and it is argued that a basis for predicting the effectiveness of alternative organisational patterns can be developed through the analysis of different sources of uncertainty as perceived by those actually involved in the decision process.

This paper deals with principles for the development of retailing and the urban centre structure. The main conclusion is that a projection of the trend of recent years could hardly be expected in spite of the fact that this is what most forecasts for retailing and centres are based upon. What is more likely to happen is a development in the form of a spiral movement which consequently makes it necessary to try other forecasting methods and other forms of mathematical models, different from the traditional ones. Such improved methods provide the basis also for an improved planning technique which in turn not only gives a split-second picture of the future situation, but also indicates how this situation is reached through extensive use of stage-planning.

This paper attempts to extend the investigation of geographic space preferences, focussing particularly on their development and their change from childhood to adulthood, and on the flows of information from which such images are formed. The data used is from Lagos and Western Nigeria. First, the area, the participants, and the questionnaire are explained. Then the space preferences of the area (from five locations) for four age groups from thirteen to twenty-three are described, and the differences between the groups are mapped. The changes over time in these space preferences are discussed, and linked to ideas on the flows of information which help form perception surfaces. The mass media, migration, travel experience, and family membership are discussed. The paper concludes with some hypotheses on the nature of space-learning.

The purpose of this paper is to show that the failure to perceive the full burden of commuting costs can bias the residential location decision in favor of distant locations. Initially, the argument is developed. Then, Federal Housing Administration data on the site expenditures of families purchasing single-family dwellings in the United States are used as a basis for an empirical investigation, the results of which are shown to be consistent with the argument.

This paper describes some problems encountered in developing and calibrating a version of the Lowry model in the Central Lancashire and Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire subregions. The formal structure of the model is presented first, and this provides the background to a discussion of the problems involved in estimating the model's parameter values, and in choosing sensitive and meaningful statistics to measure the model's goodness of fit. It is shown that statistics such as R² measuring the fit of the distributions of population and employment, are extremely insensitive to changes in the parameter values, and that the most sensitive and useful statistic for calibration is the mean trip length. Certain shortcuts in calibrating the model are also suggested by these results and these can be used to get good first approximations of the parameter values.